The term IC card is used to denote cards, generally the size of a credit card, but alternatively tokens, which are provided with an electronic microcircuit based on memories and a microcontroller which are designed to make it possible to run a transaction, for example a financial, medical or other transaction, referred to below as an application.
Known IC card readers are provided with a system which provides an information exchange link with an IC card, either by means of a multipin electrical connector, or by means of a capacitive or inductive antenna. They are essentially of two types: either self-contained or transparent.
Self-contained readers are ones which work on their own. They have communication elements which are sufficient to allow an individual to monitor and understand the running of an application: keyboard and displays which, like the information exchange link with the IC card, are managed by the reader""s own microcontroller which has a program specific to the application in question.
Transparent IC card readers are used for the IC card to access a computer system programmed especially for the application in question. For the computer system, they behave as a simple input/output port especially designed for an IC card.
The majority of IC card readers use the IC card as a simple secure-data medium or for the security or encryption functions which it can offer. They transmit instructions to the IC card which are set in a form which accords with a specific information exchange protocol, often the one defined in standard ISO 7816-3, and manage the response from the IC card, which they process themselves if they are self-contained, or return to the computer system to which they are connected, if they are transparent.
The intelligence of the application therefore lies either in the reader or in the computer system associated with the reader. The drawback of this is the need for specialization of the reader, or of the [lacuna] if it is self-contained, or that of the associated computer system if the reader is a transparent one. This constitutes an obstacle to the development of IC card applications.
To overcome this drawback, it has been proposed to shift the intelligence of the application to the IC card itself, which either stores the application management program in a high-level programming language, or receives it from the reader, still in a high-level programming language, this being for the purpose of security, and executes it by resorting to its own microcontroller and only the information display and entry capacities of the reader, which becomes generalized.
However, problems are frequently encountered with the limited processing and storage capacities of an IC card, as well as with the low bit rate of the transmission link connecting the IC card to its reader for exchanging the information, the consequence of this is that real-time management of the display of the reader from the IC card during the running of an application ends up with a brief display which does not facilitate dialogue with the user of an application as much as might be desired.
It is in particular difficult to have the microcontroller of an IC card execute an application management program which includes sophisticated display and, above all, animation jobs, even though these jobs are secondary tasks which are encountered more and more often in the most widespread of applications and which the modern definition rules for man-machine interfaces are making more elaborate day by day.
The object of the present invention is to tackle the aforementioned drawback and relieve the software workload of an IC card during the running of an application, by moving software tasks which are not specific to a particular type of application into the reader in order to increase the capacity of an IC card to support applications of greater and greater sizes.
It relates to a reader for IC cards with improved man-machine interface, having means for connection with an IC card, means for managing, at the instigation of the reader, exchanges of information with a connected IC card, means for displaying and entering information, and a circuit with microcontroller and memory which operates using programmed logic and establishes and manages a transmission link with the connected IC card, manages the means for displaying and entering information, processes the information: data and/or instructions received from the connected IC card and works out information: data, instructions or reports intended for the connected IC card. This IC card reader is noteworthy in that its circuit with microcontroller and memory is provided with a multitask operating system, and contains space in memory for a library of programs which define visual and/or audio, or other objects that are displayed on the display means and are executed by the circuit with microcontroller and memory of the said reader under the supervision of its operating system, as basic background task, in response to a call coming from a transaction management program which may equally well run by the connected IC card or by the said reader.
Other characteristics and advantages of the invention will emerge from the following description of an embodiment of the invention, which is given by way of example. This description will be given with reference to the drawing, in which the single FIGURE schematically illustrates the architecture of an IC card reader according to the invention and of an IC card.